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User talk:Blhotka
Haeremai, welcome, talofa, Willkommen, bienvenue, welkom Hello, and welcome to Familypedia, the Genealogy wiki! We volunteers hope you can continue making contributions to articles and/or discussion and other improvements. If you are new to Wikia or wikis in general, a visit to will be well worth while. And all intending contributors, even those experienced with wikis, will get something of value from that page because our "Help" pages are much more than an editing guide. You could check out the "Community portal" for an outline of some of the main features, links to pages that tell you how to edit, and the link to a guided tour of selected pages that illustrate ways you may enjoy using the site. Please consider adding a "Babel" template to your user page, if you have not already done so, so that others know which languages you are comfortable reading. The site is basically in English but there is no prohibition on other languages and we have ways of linking to translations. We already have, for example, over 100 kB in Spanish, dozens of pages in French, and a little Russian and Norwegian, with easy ways of linking languages. A good place to start each visit is the ' ', where all edits and their authors (anonymous or signed-in) are listed. Bookmark it, maybe. (And help delete spam - unpleasant but a fact of life.) There's an email list system used to get messages to all listed members: see Genealogy:Mailing list. "Traffic" is not high, so you will not risk flooding your inbox by joining. You're invited to add your name to a category for your country - see Category:Contributors and create a category if yours is not there. Discussion of any aspect of the site, and enquiries, can be made through the Forum or on the "discussion" page associated with each article. Sign and date your contributions there (by typing "~~~~" or clicking the "signature" button), so that readers know "who to talk to" and whether your message is probably still of current interest. If you write on a user's "talk" page, that user will get an alerting message on next visit. It would be good if you could indicate on your user page how you discovered this site. Please leave a message on my talk page if you think I may help with anything! -- Phlox (Talk) 18:25, 30 June 2009 Impressive debut Hi! We must have got our procedures fairly well organized, because you have been flying through in great style. I've created Lhotka (surname) to help you along. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:09, 1 July 2009 (UTC) "Marriage = true" Fair enough entry in the "Marriage" line, but most of us make it a bit more informative, because it's the one used for display in the infobox. One of the guideline pages says this about it: :Marriage: Indicate both date and location. Preferably, you may encode dates as links to articles on the day/month and year, and make the place-names links to Familypedia pages. Here's an example: Mabel Louisa Cook (1901-1980)/info. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:57, 1 July 2009 (UTC) Names - maiden, married, similar, etc Hi! I'd noticed your sprinkling of married and maiden names before you asked. Birth name is the standard, as noted at Genealogy:Page names. The "Alternative names" provision can cover all later variants including married surnames. Exceptions are made for most titled people, e.g. William I, King of England (1027-1087). One recent forum upgrade that touches on them is Forum:Royalty- Surname encoding. Policies not set in stone but should be more settled before we get into bulk gedcom import and matching. To change a page name, use "Move". Leave the original page behind as a redirect. Create other redirects if a person is likely to be sought under a married name or any other. Also, to list people with similar names, see the hndis page. Orville Lhotka looks like an early candidate there. If you do several with the same surname in succession you can reduce the amount of work because only the first name needs to be changed (in four places). Have I got you confused yet?! I see you are not alone now. I look forward to reading about the origins of your surname, which was quite unknown to me a week ago. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:52, 2 July 2009 (UTC) Thanks again, Robin. I believe I've corrected the married name vs. surname now - I appreciate your input! Also I saw that I shouldn't have been putting a question mark for year of death for anyone living... so I corrected that as well. Yeah - you did lose me with the following advice - your clarification would be greatly appreciated! Also, to list people with similar names, see the hndis page. Orville Lhotka looks like an early candidate there. If you do several with the same surname in succession you can reduce the amount of work because only the first name needs to be changed (in four places). Have I got you confused yet?! A seemingly recent family tradition is to use the first given name of the father as the 1st son's middle name. It seems to be a loosely held tradition. So Rockford Duane is the son of Duane Orville is the son of Orville Garfield. Not sure where the name Garfield came from - the tradition may have started with the naming of my father. My brother decided to go a different way, yet I've restarted the tradition with the naming of my son... Alexander Benjamin is the son of Benjamin Victor. My middle name came from my great grandfather. It seems my brother's joined in on the fun! I've invited a few other folks - will be interesting to see who becomes active here. I know 2 or 3 folks in the family who are actively working family history - not sure if they'll change from using MS Word to this tool though (I hope so!). Blhotka 18:42, 5 July 2009 (UTC) New easier systems Hello, you and your family seem to have eased off. Since your last recorded edit, the system of person-data input has greatly improved and is nearly flawless. You get to it straight from the "Create new article" link in the sidebar. Your articles may have been automatically upgraded, in which case there's an "Edit with form" option as well as an "Edit this page" option. "Edit with form" if available is safer and probably easier. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:25, March 6, 2010 (UTC) It WAS nearly flawless. But we've had software updates imposed on us and not found how to make proper use of them. Just a couple of weeks after my last message to you, a version of Semantic Forms made our main form unusable with any browser except Firefox. I suspect that your recent deletionary edit suffered there. I've restored it. Please have a look at the current "guidelines" - the "Help: Creating articles" link at the top of the page. Other apparent glitches are mostly referred to in a forum item. Robin Patterson 02:33, February 16, 2011 (UTC) The forms are now working pretty well with any browser, as you may have discovered. Keep up the good work and get those relatives on board! (And be aware of the privacy issue noted below.) -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:37, January 24, 2013 (UTC) Living persons Our policy is to discourage people from adding full birth dates for any living persons. Identity theft is too easy these days and getting more common. Robin Patterson 02:33, February 16, 2011 (UTC)